Picnics and divine appointments

Sat under Charles de Kiewiet’s preaching at Honeyridge; thoroughly blessed by his message on the Samaritan woman at the well with the application of ‘what are you filling the gaps in your life with?’. After church we had an hour or two to kill before our farewell picnic at the Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens, so took the boys to the Wimpy at Clearwater Mall. We got ourselves lost in the mall which does not seem to be arranged in any logical order – I personally suspect that the architect was playing dominoes with his kids one day and thought the haphazard arrangement of tiles on a table would make for a good shopping mall. Nearly ran late for our picnic but fortunately got there before any of our guests, which comprised mostly our families and two or three other friend families. It was a great afternoon, and the thirteen or fourteen kids were occupied and exhausted by the end of the afternoon despite not being permitted Frisbees, balls, or any other form of potentially nuisance-inducing toys in the gardens. They ran around and used their imaginations. I took a walk with Ray and La to the waterfall where the black eagles traditionally nest and circle and spotted two of them hanging onto a cliff face (I was helped both by another eagle-spotter and my zoom lens). We left the boys with their cousins in the garden and went to church by ourselves – figured the boys would fall asleep during the message anyway, and were pleased that they could spend a bit more time with Kaydon and Jared. The evening message was good again, this time brought by Brian Jardine. We were surprised to see two friends from Pretoria at the service, and invited them back to my parents place afterwards for soup and rolls and fellowship. We were staggered at God’s providence at our meeting and the conversations we had, particularly when Glen joined us a bit later after his service at Krugersdorp to spend some final time with Nick. What a great God we serve who is sovereign in all matters and whose loving kindness exceeds our expectations.